A Rumor of War Read online

  “You’re not at Quantico any more. You’ll draw fire doing that.”

  I told him that the VC had just given me the same message in more emphatic terms.

  When the skirmish ended, a squad searched the tree line but found only a few spent cartridges. The phantoms had pulled off another vanishing act. Late that afternoon, sunburned, bone-tired, wondering if we had accomplished anything, suspecting that we had not, we linked up with D Company and were flown back to base camp.

  Six

  I warrant you, you shall find the ceremonies of the wars, and the cares of it, and the forms of it … to be otherwise.

  —Shakespeare

  Henry V

  For the next few weeks, the rifle companies kept to a schedule almost as regular as that of office clerks or factory workers. In effect, we commuted to and from the war. We went into the bush for a day or two or three, returned for a brief rest, and went out again.

  There was no pattern to these patrols and operations. Without a front, flanks, or rear, we fought a formless war against a formless enemy who evaporated like the morning jungle mists, only to materialize in some unexpected place. It was a haphazard, episodic sort of combat. Most of the time, nothing happened; but when something did, it happened instantaneously and without warning. Rifle or machine-gun fire would erupt with heart-stopping suddenness, as when quail or pheasant explode from cover with a loud beating of wings. Or mortar shells would come in from nowhere, their only preamble the cough of the tubes.

  In those weeks we did not see heavy fighting; the battalion’s casualties averaged no more than twenty a month, out of a total combat strength of about a thousand men. But we saw enough to learn those lessons that could not be taught in training camps: what fear feels like and what death looks like, and the smell of death, the experience of killing, of enduring pain and inflicting it, the loss of friends and the sight of wounds. We learned what war was about, “the cares of it, and the forms of it.” We began to change, to lose the boyish awkwardness we had brought to Vietnam. We became more professional, leaner and tougher, and a callus began to grow around our hearts, a kind of emotional flak jacket that blunted the blows and stings of pity.

  Because of the sporadic, confused nature of the fighting, it is impossible to give an orderly account of what we did. With one or two exceptions, I have only disjointed recollections of this period, the spring of 1965. The incidents I do remember, I remember vividly; but I can come up with no connecting thread to tie events neatly together.

  * * *

  The company is tramping down a dirt road past a Catholic church built long ago by French missionaries. Its gothic style looks out of place in this Asian landscape. Its walls are made of a dark, volcanic-looking rock. The courtyard is enclosed by a stone fence which bougainvillaea covers like bunting and there is a crucifix atop the arched gate. We are marching in a double file through a pall of dust raised by our boots. The dust drifts slowly away from the road and sifts down on the courtyard, dulling the brilliance of the bougainvillaea. It is an extremely hot day, hotter than any we have yet experienced. We have been told that the temperature is over one hundred and ten degrees, but the figure is meaningless. The cruelty of this sun cannot be measured by an instrument. Head bowed, a machine-gunner in front of me is walking with his weapon braced across the back of his shoulders, one hand hanging over the muzzle and the other over the butt, so that his shadow resembles the Christ figure on the cross atop the gate of the church. Farther on, the road runs past a stretch of low, grassy hills and flooded rice paddies. A deserted village lies ahead, a little more than halfway to our objective, an abandoned tea plantation.

  Lemmon’s platoon is at point, and I can see them through the dust, marching heavy-legged beneath a sky that is as bright as a plate of stainless steel. There is a sudden spattering of small-arms fire, the bullets raising geysers in the flooded paddies. The column stops while Lemmon’s men deploy into a skirmish line and charge toward the hills. They splash across the fields, dodge the sudden eruptions of mud and water, then vanish into the elephant grass that covers the high ground. Passing through it, they enter the village. Two squads file back onto the road, a third remains behind to search the huts. We hear calls of “Fire in the hole!” and muffled explosions as grenades are thrown into bunkers and tunnels. But the enemy is not there. The squad returns to the column, and we are marching again, marching in the heat and choking dust.

  * * *

  My platoon is manning an outpost on a hill at the tip of a ridgeline a thousand yards forward of C Company’s lines. We have been on the outpost for two days, though it seems more like two weeks. There is nothing to do during the day except sit in the sandbagged foxholes and gaze out at the rice paddies and the mountains beyond. The nights have been hours of nervous wakefulness broken by intervals of fitful sleep. Listening to things—men? snakes? animals?—crawling in the underbrush. Swatting mosquitoes. Trying to see in a blackness that is occasionally lighted by a distant flare.

  It is now the afternoon of the third day. I am sitting in the platoon command post with Sergeant Gordon. We have rigged a lean-to over the foxhole to shield ourselves from the sun, but it is still hot. The rubber poncho billows and sags in the spasmodic breezes that blow through the tops of the trees. Gordon, a short, pink-faced career marine, is talking about fear and bravery. He says that bravery is the conquest of fear, which is not an entirely new idea. I am only half listening to him, anyway. I am trying to read the paperback Kipling which lies open in my lap, but I cannot concentrate because Gordon is talking and because an invincible weariness prevents me from reading more than a few lines at a time. Also, I keep thinking about a girl, a tall, blond girl with whom I spent my leave in San Francisco five months and a hundred years ago. I miss her a good deal, but when I think of her, I find it difficult to remember her face clearly. She and San Francisco are so far away that they seem not to exist. Sweat drips off my nose and onto the Kipling, smudging the print. Gordon chatters away.

  I pick up my field glasses and scan the valley below. Dampness has smeared the lenses, so all I see is a blurred, light-dappled green. It is as though I were sitting with goggles on at the bottom of a green river. I wipe the lenses and my face, but in a few seconds a fresh flood of sweat cascades into my eyes. I wipe the lenses again, and sweep the glasses over the empty valley. I have done this dozens of times in the past forty-eight hours. That is my mission: “To keep the Song Tuy Loan river valley under observation and report on all enemy movement and activity sighted.” There isn’t any enemy movement or activity, of course. All I see are the sunstricken paddies, a cone-shaped hill half a mile away, Hill 324, and the jagged wall of the Annamese range. It is interesting how the color green, which poets and songwriters always associate with youth and hope, can be so depressing when there is no other color to contrast with it. Green. It is embedded in my consciousness. My vision is filled with green rice paddies, green hills, green mountains, green uniforms; light green, medium green, dark green, olive green. It is as monotonous as Gordon’s voice.

  I interrupt him by reading aloud the stanza to a poem which has caught my eye:

  And the end of the fight is a tombstone white

  with the name of the late deceased,

  And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here

  who tried to hustle the East.”

  Gordon misses the irony, and launches into a discussion of his favorite poem, a ballad called “Rye Whiskey.” He begins singing it in a nasal twang.

  Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey I cry,

  If I don’t get rye whiskey, I surely will die.

  And I think, If you don’t shut up, Gordon, you surely will and a lot sooner than you expected. That is what I think, but I don’t say it. I recognize that I am in the second stage of the cafard, the stage in which you feel a hatred for everything and everyone around you. To get away from Gordon, I go to check the perimeter. The marines are all in the same state of mind as I, “fed-up, fucked-up, and far from hom
e.” Their arms are tanned a deep brown, but the heat has bled the color from their faces, and their eyes have that blank expression known as the “thousand-yard stare.”

  * * *

  It is night on the same outpost, and in at least one marine, PFC Buchanan, boredom has given way to terror. He has fired several shots at something he heard moving in front of his position. I am raging at him: “You goddamned amateur. You’re supposed to throw a grenade if there’s something there, not fire your weapon. The muzzle-flash could give your position away. You ought to know that.” The lecture does not do any good. Buchanan stands in a tense crouch, his rifle resting on the sandbagged parapet, his finger on the trigger. He won’t look at me, keeping his eyes fixed on the jungle straight ahead. The vegetation is gray-green in the moonlight. “Buchanan,” I whisper, “take your finger off the trigger. Relax. It was probably one of those rock apes they’ve got up here.” He does not move. Fear has overmastered him. Looking down the length of his rifle, he insists that the noise was made by a man. “All right. I’ll stay here for a while. I don’t want you firing unless you’ve got a target.” I slide down into the foxhole, remove a grenade from my pocket, crimp the pin, and lay it aside.

  A while later, Buchanan says in a low voice, “There he is, there he is.” I hear a loud, dry rustling, as if someone were crumpling a sheet of crepe paper. Standing up, I look over the parapet and see some bushes moving twenty or twenty-five yards downhill. Whatever is in there is big, as big as a man; but I cannot believe an infiltrator would make so much noise. Unless he is trying to draw our fire. The rustling stops. There is a soft click as Buchanan eases the safety off. Again I tell him that it is probably a rock ape. I no longer completely believe this, and Buchanan does not believe it at all. “That ain’t no fuckin’ monkey, lieutenant.” The rustling begins again. A bush quivers and grows still; the one next to it moves, then the one next to that. Something or someone is crawling along the hillside, parallel to the perimeter line. Before Buchanan can fire, I pull the pin on the grenade. Lobbing it with one hand, I pull Buchanan down with the other. The grenade explodes. A cloud of smoke drifts up through the gray-green underbrush, like dry-ice vapor, and the rustling has stopped. “If there really was a VC out there,” I say, “that either killed him or scared the hell out of him.” Buchanan at last takes the rifle from his shoulder; the grenade appears to have restored his confidence.

  I return to the command post by way of a trail that leads through an avenue of trees with black, greasy trunks. It is dark in there, almost as dark as a vault, and I feel relieved when I am safely back in the CP. Widener is calling the hourly situation report to company HQ. “Charley Six, this is Charley Two. All secure, situation remains the same.”

  Later, I am startled awake by rifle fire. I seem to have developed an odd ability to sleep and not sleep at the same time. My head is instantly clear, and I know what has happened, just as if I had been awake all the time. There have been a couple of shots from a carbine and a burst from an M-14. The firing has come from my right rear, near Lance Corporal Marshall’s position. I climb out of the foxhole and walk in that direction down the trail that leads through the dark avenue of trees. I stop when I see the silhouette of a man thirty or forty feet ahead. I think it is a man. The figure is not moving. He must have seen me at the same moment. We look at each other for what seems a long time. I cannot see if he is armed, although I know I heard a carbine. Or did I imagine it? Am I imagining now? Maybe I am looking at nothing more than a bush shaped like a man. As I have been trained to do, I look at the outline of the figure rather than directly at it. If you look straight at an object at night, your eyes play tricks on you. So I look at the edges of the form, the figure, the bush, whatever it is. Yes, it is a man, frozen in mid-stride, apparently because he is trying to figure out if I have seen him. I cannot see a weapon, but he could have one; or he could be carrying grenades. I want to challenge him, to shout “Dung lai” (halt), but the words catch in my throat and a weakness creeps into my legs. Transfixed, I am still watching him as he watches me. Time passes as in a nightmare that lasts only a few seconds but seems to go on and on. A marine yells something, something like “He’s over there.” The figure moves, and in one motion I unsnap the flap of my holster, draw the pistol, pull back the slide to chamber a round, and take aim. He is gone, crashing through the underbrush downhill. I aim at the sound but hold my fire, afraid of hitting one of my own men. Then I am aware that my heart is beating very fast and that the checkered grip of the pistol is slick with sweat.

  Marshall comes up to me and tells me what happened. He had been off watch, lying in his hooch, when he heard movement a short distance away. There was a challenge from a sentry, followed by a few shots. Scrambling out of his hooch, Marshall saw a VC running past, toward the command post; but the infiltrator vanished into the darkness before anyone could get a clear shot at him.

  After passing the word that there is to be a one-hundred-percent alert for the next hour, I walk back to the CP and take over radio watch from Widener. I am still not sure if the figure I saw and heard was a Viet Cong, an animal of some kind, or a chimera. The fear is real enough, though. We pass an uneventful but nervous night, and I feel like rejoicing when the sky begins to lighten and I call in the last situation report. “Charley Six, this is Charley Two. All secure, situation remains the same.”

  * * *

  Corporal Parker and I are in the division field hospital, visiting PFC Esposito, a grenadier in one of my squads. Esposito is seriously ill and is going to be evacuated to the States. A stocky, dark-skinned boy, he talks about going home after four years in the Marines. He has mixed feelings about it. It will be good to go home, he says, but he regrets having to leave the battalion and Parker, who has been his buddy since boot camp. Esposito appears to be heavily drugged. He lies on his canvas cot, eyes glassy, voice thick. Parker punches him softly in the shoulder and says, “You’ll be okay. Hey, we’ve been together a long time, huh?”

  “Yeah, a long time,” Esposito says in a voice that sounds like a record playing at too slow a speed.

  “Remember that Cuban missile thing back in ’sixty-two? Man, that seems like a long time ago.” Turning to me, Parker says, “We’re tight, lieutenant. Me and Esposito are real tight.”

  There are several wounded men in the tent, three marines and half a dozen South Vietnamese. The empty cots are spotted with dried bloodstains. Two of the three marines have been slightly wounded and are relaxing as if on a holiday. The third has a serious head injury. He is heavily bandaged. An intravenous tube is inserted in one of his forearms, a plasma tube in the other, and the tubes hang down from bottles suspended on a metal rack. Another tube is attached to his penis. Various fluids—urine, glucose, blood plasma—course steadily through the plastic tubes. The marine is a big, athletically built man, so tall that his feet hang over the edge of the cot. He lies still, and I can tell he is alive only by the rising and falling of his chest and the low, guttural sounds he makes every few minutes.

  A corpsman puts a thermometer in his mouth, checks his blood pressure, then goes to look after the ARVN soldier who lies on the bed next to Esposito. It is a regular hospital bed, elevated so that the soldier is almost sitting straight up. Bandages and plaster casts cover every part of his body except one arm, the lower half of his face, and the top of his head. A shock of thick, black hair droops over the battle dressing wrapped around his forehead and eyes. A number of instruments are attached to the soldier’s body: tubes, rubber hoses, clamps, pressure gauges. Wrapped in white, with all those devices on him, he reminds me of one of those hideous experiments in a horror movie.

  Parker and Esposito continue reminiscing about their long friendship. Parker’s eyes are damp, his voice cracking with emotion, and I feel embarrassed, as if I am listening in on the conversation of two lovers who are about to be separated. I turn to talk to the corpsman, asking him what happened to the South Vietnamese soldier. The corpsman tells me that he has been wounded i
n the left arm, both legs, the stomach and head and is expected to die in a day or two. The marine is less fortunate.

  “He’ll probably go through the rest of his life about the way he is now, a vegetable,” the corpsman says.

  A few moments later, almost as if he were trying to disprove this prognosis, the marine begins to thrash around and make a strange noise, a sort of gurgling snarl. Then I hear a sound like that of a crisp celery stalk being bitten in half. In his spasm, the marine has clamped his jaws on the thermometer. He is trying to swallow it. “Son of a bitch,” the corpsman says, running over and pulling the crushed instrument out of the marine’s mouth. The big man convulses violently, the bottles sway on the rack while the corpsman removes a Syrette from his kit. He daubs alcohol on the marine’s muscular arm and injects the sedative.

  “Easy, easy,” he says, holding the man down. “Easy, easy. We’re going to have to give you a rectal thermometer from now on. Give it to you in the ass before you kill yourself.”

  The sedative begins to take effect. The marine’s spasms subside, the snarling falls off to a succession of moans, and finally he is quiet.

  * * *

  We are lying in a ditch while an AK-47 rivets little pieces of copper-jacketed death into the road in front of us. When the firing stops, we run across and return fire from behind an embankment on the other side. We shoot without aiming into a field of elephant grass and up at some low, rounded hills nearby. A few of us clamber over the embankment, form a skirmish line and move through the field toward the hills. A rifleman cranks off a couple of rounds at something he has seen or heard, or something he thinks he has seen or heard. It is dead-still and broiling in the grass, hot enough to make it difficult to breathe.